After a remarkable rise in America’s energy production and the creation of more than one million jobs, oil and natural gas companies are wrestling with a new challenge: holding on to those gains.

Production has shot up 60 percent in the past decade, providing a greater single boost to the U.S. economy than any other business sector. Thanks to hydraulic fracturing—fracking—and sophisticated information technology, energy production has increased so much that the United States is, remarkably, the world’s leading oil and natural gas producer.